More on TechnologyTell: Gadget News | Apple News
Why the iPhone shines as an e-reader—especially for newspapers
May 19, 2009 | 4:28 am
|
By David Rothman
I own an iPod Touch and two E Ink machines.
Guess which gizmo I spend the most time with—whether reading books or newspapers.
And it isn’t just the ability to stuff the thing into my pocket. That sharp little LCD is handy in dim surroundings.
Far from an e-book reader alone, the Touch excels at running dedicated news-related apps, such as those from the New York Times, the Associated Press and USA Today.
In fact, I’ve got a friendly word of advice for newspapers like the Times that are in a position to charge. Maybe you should be offering the iPod Touch with the app already installed. Bundle it in a subscription to enhanced services, such as extra articles, more timely items and full access to the archives.
Kindle fans, relax. It’s a matter of individual taste, and, yes, some people just demand larger screens even though a K app is available for the Touch and iPhone.
A British perspective
But over in Europe, where they don’t even have Kindles, at least not officially, Adam Hodgkins of Exact Editions, now living in Italy but from the U.K. originally, has blogged a fascinating two-part love letter to his iPhone as an e-reader. The iPhone, of course, is more or less the same as a Touch with the phone feature included.
From Part One: “There is a threshold with each App, which keeps you within the App in which in which you are browsing; whereas when one is reading a news site on the wild web it is just too easy to be distracted. Every link is a link out. Its too easy to flip over to something else, there are no boundaries to a web newspaper or a web magazine. But there are some subtle boundaries to an App which is branded for a newspaper or a magazine.” Some might object to the iPhone for the very reason that Adam like it, but he’s entitled. Again—a matter of taste.
From Part Two: “First, the touch screen allows the user to shrink or enlarge the page with simple ‘pinch’ or ‘spread’ moves of paired fingers. Because we use our fingers to stretch or compress the page, and the image responds immediately, it is very easy to achieve a high level of control of image resolution. It would be much harder to do this work with the conventional touchpad or mouse of a desktop PC. The facility with which the page can be resized (web page, or digital facsimile, eg JPEG in the case of Exact Editions) means that on the iPhone platform, at least, there is much less pressure for the ‘reflowable’ text beloved of eBook enthusiasts. There is really no need to reflow text to achieve a different point size, when the whole page can be resized with finger pinching.”
Er, Adam, I’ve got a problem: reflowable text is easier for me to deal with on my Touch, too. Besides, the philosophy behind reflowable formats like ePub is to make multiplatform use easier. The whole mobile world doesn’t use iPhones.
That said, I wholeheartedly share your enthusiasm for the iPhone/Touch as a reader. It’ll be interesting to see how I feel when the Sony Reader and Kindle finally do offer high-contrast screens.
Related: Why e-books so ugly, on the Wired site.
|
Previous
SUBSCRIBE TO RSS
Comments:
Exactly. All these specialized iPhone apps won’t be worth squat when the electronics industry gives us the Next Big Thing (in probably about 3 years). But news orgs with well-organized web sites will play on everything.
So instead of trying to con the newspapers into wasting time on a brand new architecture every 5 years or so, tell them to design a good web site. Period.
Hey, Steve, that’s fine except for the “Period.” Readers need a variety of approaches. With a Web site, access is near-universal. On the other hand, with the right dedicated app, people can do things such as file away editions for consumption later on.
Thanks,
David
Sure, David… but how many dedicated apps are you going to depend on a service to provide? Do they need to do a web version, a Kindle version, an iPhone version, a flip-phone version, a Playstation version, a speech version, a TTY version, a… see what I mean?
One XML-based web version, with a style sheet designed to customize the content to your device, should be all that any service needs to provide. When properly done, it can also encapsulate editions for storage and later use, as well as make old editions available for use when you need them.
It may not be a picnic to set up… but once done, it’s a lot easier to deal with one style sheet than than nine versions of the same content.
I get all my news from the New York Times, on my iPhone. I’ll confess I don’t use the app, rather, I just have their mobile site bookmarked. But I still love it and read the news several times a day, depending on what’s going on in the world.
I honestly can’t remember the last time I picked up a print newspaper!
It may not be a picnic to set up… but once done, it’s a lot easier to deal with one style sheet than than nine versions of the same content.